Re: ESD, aRts, ALSA, OSS, and GStreamer

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

On Mon, 2006-04-24 at 21:57 -0700, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> > Sound device sharing, and being a public API for portable audio file
> handling (together
> > with libaudiofile).
>  
> By portable audio file handling what exactly do you mean? Would I be
> correct if I said it is to decode the various audio file formats in an
> operating system independent manner?

Yes.

> > A lot of people don't need it since they want to use alsa/dmix
> instead of esd.
>  
> Why? How is ALSA superior to ESD, or for that matter aRts? Are ESD and
> aRts abstraction layers built on top of ALSA?

In some ways yes, as ESD abstracts away ALSA, OSS, SunAudio and so on.
For a lot of people this abstraction is of little value today and
GStreamer itself also provides such an abstraction.

Software today often is an abstraction of an abstraction of an
abstraction of an abstraction all running on top of another
abstraction :)

Christian